When data delivery is cooking, so are the servers. Data processing generates heat, but servers need to stay cool. That means expensive air-conditioning and big electricity costs. But Microsoft is currently working on a different solution. Water. You take a dip when the heat wave strikes in the summer, right? Microsoft is working on a way to dunk your data for the same reason.
Microsoft just unveiled its Project Natick, an initiative to put data centers under the sea. Interestingly one of Microsoft’s main considerations isn’t just the cooling factor, but the proximity. “50% of us live near the coast,” the company says. “Why doesn’t our data?” Project Manager Ben Cutler describes Natick as a “radical approach to how we deploy data centers.” The overall goal is to “deploy data centers at scale anywhere in the world [ready] to power on within 90 days.” It’s very technical achievement (electricity and water?), but here’s the very simple aspect. They want to make the “actual cable to our customers as short as possible.” It’s very early stage: they’re still “evaluating whether this concept could be adopted.”
